Responses to odor vary strongly by culture. Europeans have been found to be indifferent to maple syrup, averse to Concord grape, and repelled by root beer, all of which North Americans tend to love. Familiarity is a strong predictor of olfactory approval; we like what we know. Southern Europeans like the smell of lavender in their laundry products; Americans like laundry products that are advertised as lavender but smell like vanilla.
https://harpers.org/archive/2021/12/the-odor-of-things-solving-the-mysteries-of-scent/
Author: mdow
Daily links: dinosaurs!
This old story was in my backlog of tabs to share. https://metro.co.uk/2020/11/20/first-complete-t-rex-skeleton-found-locked-in-battle-with-triceratops-13625874/
It’s about a fossil … two fossils, really … which were (as of November 2020) supposed to go on display early last year. I looked up the exhibit and apparently it’s not happening until 2023. That’s academic timing for you
Dueling Dinosaurs – An experience 67 million years in the making
Daily Link: A Mae West Retrospective
This is one of the oldest tabs in my phone–I’ve been meaning to share it for two whole years or more: A rollicking history of Mae West’s career.
https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/7212-the-self-created-immortality-of-mae-west
Daily Links: On the Pomodoro technique and self-optimization
As someone who is far too prone to using the language of “optimization” and “productivity” to describe the things that make me feel good, this essay says a lot of the things I find it hard to remember all at once. It’s a very long read but absolutely worth it.
For the quantified, self-Taylorized self, there is no one to blame when something goes wrong, when productivity and perfectibility grind to a halt — no one, that is, except oneself. For the man who is his own manager is blamed twice-over for a weak growth rate: first, for mismanaging, and second, for being unmanageable.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/time-management-on-the-pomodoro-technique-and-martin-hagglunds-this-life/
Daily Link: Old News about the Met
I was in NYC recently, for a very brief birthday trip, and found to my dismay that Wednesday (my only full day in the City) is the day that all the museums close. Oh well. I shrugged and walked the length of Central Park instead.
Going through my phone tabs, I was reminded that this was one of the reasons I should have wanted to visit the Met again: they just finished a renovation of the halls where the Old Masters are on display.
https://spectatorworld.com/book-and-art/old-masters-new-look-metropolitan-museum-art/
Daily Link: A homily on St. Thomas Aquinas
St. Thomas is my patron saint, the first saint whose intercession I really thought I could ask for. His feast day is my birthday, so I felt like it was fitting to choose him even though it also seemed tremendously cliche — it seemed too obvious, for an academic coming out of a protestant family to choose him. But I did anyway and I wouldn’t have it any differently.
Anyway, one of the delights of the end of the end of January is enjoying the whole church’s celebrations of this dear saint.
This is from a sermon that was preached at Thomas Aquinas College on January 28; I commend the whole thing to you.
We can, therefore in these troubled times, rest assured that God’s providence is over all, and that the study of St. Thomas and the Great Books of the West — and learning how to reason and think — the Lord will put this, this light, this food that has been rightly salted, to good use, to nourish our contemporaries and future generations.
So Thomas would have us remember that God — for we and our words are in the hand of God — for His wisdom knows and has all prudence and knowledge of crafts.
https://www.thomasaquinas.edu/news/st-thomas-day-homily-we-and-our-words-are-his-hand
Daily link: on tradition
Westerners have in countless ways abandoned our traditional values, rituals and customs, and we cannot resurrect traditions on the grounds of their being traditional. Do not misunderstand me here. I am not saying you cannot revive a tradition. But if it can be accomplished it is on the basis of its being useful, moral, beautiful or true (or all of the above) — on the basis of, as Stanley rightly comments in his book, “the original truth that [it] was built to express.” A habit perseveres until it is broken and people have to know why they should take it up again.
Ben Sixsmith, “The Trouble with Tradition”
Daily Link: Beef Chili recipe
I liked this recipe for beef chili, but in the end I found it a trifle under-seasoned. Maybe I should have just added more salt at each of the times when it said to add salt, but it didn’t have the right “zing” for me.
https://www.markbittman.com/recipes-1/slow-simmered-beef-chili
Announcing Daily Links
Hi, all 4 readers of this blog! I do this stupid thing where I save more than a hundred tabs on my phone because someday I’m going to get around to sharing the links with witty insightful comments. Right now my browser has LITERALLY stopped counting how many tabs I have open and just gives me a little smiley face instead.
So I’m going to stop imagining all my future wit and just share the dang links, one per day, scheduled out (so most of these posts will be written in early February and then doled out slowly over the coming months).
Recipe: Fall Cider Punch
Here’s the short version: you live in Texas, where it’s hot until mid-November, but you still want a spiced apple cider cocktail because it’s FALL dangit. So you come up with a kind of punch that uses a boozy spiced-cider base and then chilled cider and sparkling wine to fill up the glass. I made this for a party, it was a hit, and I don’t want to forget what I did.
The cocktail recipe
Behold, the proportions:
1.25 oz base
3 oz chilled apple cider (roughly)
3 oz sparkling wine (roughly)
The recipe for the cooking part
Of course, the real bit where you need a recipe is to make the base. Behold:
In a saucepan, simmer together for about 8-10 minutes :
2 C. real apple cider
3 star anise
1 thumb-knuckle-length knob of ginger, sliced into thick chunks
Peel of one medium lemon
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon. or 2-3 cinnamon sticks
Remove from heat and strain out the spices. If you used ground cinnamon, you will want to filter the mixture through cheesecloth so that the cinnamon doesn’t continue to steep and overwhelm the other flavors.
Add to the base mixture:
1/2 C brandy
6 dashes angostura bitters
Juice of half a lemon
Cooking Notes
- Start tasting the base at 8 minutes and decide if you like the flavor balance. I started with 5, and it wasn’t nearly flavorful enough at that point. At 8, I decided I still wanted it a little more gingery and spiced, so I went up to the full 10.
- The cider should not be the clear stuff you get in the juice aisle of the supermarket. I don’t know why they call that cider, because it isn’t. What you want is the kind of juice that has been squeezed from apples and put straight into a bottle. I got a good jug of it at Aldi. Honeycrisp apple juice, available seasonally, would probably also be appropriate.
- The lemon peel should ideally be in strips for easy removal later, but if you go with the ground cinnamon you’ll have to filter it anyway so I guess lemon zest wouldn’t be a problem.
- This is a recipe born out of my very own brain. I looked at a lot of recipes online but none of them did what I wanted, so I took inspiration from some common ingredients and did my own thing. .
Love moves the sun and the other stars. 